Sponsored content or “native advertising” in various forms is growing in popularity as publishers seek additional sources of revenue. Done well it can be a good fit for both publishers and advertisers, and dare I say even add value for…
Are searchers less interested in celebrity gossip than they used to be? According to Google Trends, yes. While doing some research I was surprised to see that search interest in the keyword phrase [celebrity gossip] peaked around 2009. Despite occasional…
In reading the Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media 2013 there were some interesting things in the sections on magazines and digital that I thought I’d point out. Time is Doing Well Online One is that among the…
Now that Instagram web profiles have been around for a few months I thought I’d check in on the participation and activity of major news brands. I keep coming across things like the Simply Measured study showing that 59% of…
How long does it take Google to process 14 million 301 redirects? How about 360,000 redirects for Bing? A year ago a publisher that we work with decided to discontinue a large domain and migrate only a small portion of…
The news of layoffs at StumbleUpon reminded me that in compiling some year-end social media referral data I’d noticed that a number of sites had experienced declines in StumbleUpon traffic. To get a better sense of the situation I pulled…
In working with publishers one of the things I’m most frequently asked to do is troubleshoot problems with Google News. Anyone involved with a news or content site can attest to the importance of Google News and news search optimization.…
Which news sites get the most engagement on their Google+ pages? It’s been a year since I took an early look at engagement rates for news organizations on Google+, so I thought I’d revisit the topic and do a fresh…
Another year gone by, and that means it’s time again for the obligatory top-posts-of-the-year lists. These roundups may be overdone, but personally I like doing one because it is interesting to look back and see what made an impression. With…
Ever notice how the most flattering blog comments are actually the spam comments? This always makes me smile, so I thought I’d share a handful of them here. It would be a shame for so much unbridled positivity to never…